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Comment by catern | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps you would find info pages more useful. For example, 'info grep'.

I hate info.

I have to read the info docs before I can read the docs I wanted to read. They're also divided up into little pieces unnecessarily, so I have to think rather than scroll until my eye catches what I need.

info is up there with inkjet printers and trying to make sound work worth a damn in Linux on my list of things that have frustrated me regularly for the past 20 years.

I have a small script in my ~/bin that pipes `info --subnodes "$@"` into less. That way I don't have to remember all the keys, and the whole output is like a big man page. Although on Debian and Ubuntu the info pages are usually not available by default anyway due to the "GNU docs are non-free"-decision Debian made a few years ago.

I find that the Man pages on BSD-derived systems are generally quite exceptional, where as GNU-based systems seem to be less so. `info` seems to be their attempt at making a better `man`, but it's pretty hit-or-miss if a Linux-based project thats not from the FSF supports infopages over manpages.

info itself is merely annoying (to me).

But the one thing I hate about info is that they often change the "see also" near the end of a man page from a list of similar or related commands that you might want to also read, to an invitation to use the info chapter for that command. Aarrrggghhh!

  man less
  ...
  SEE ALSO
         lesskey(1)


  man ls
  ...
  SEE ALSO
         The full documentation for ls is maintained as a  Texinfo  manual.
         If  the info and ls programs are properly installed at your site, the command

              info coreutils 'ls invocation'

       should give you access to the complete manual.

Why hijack a useful section? Why not just add a "SEE INFO" section?

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